The buzz continues for cloud, data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) and their collective impact across all industries. But a new conversation is emerging – how do companies use industry disruption and technology enablers to lead in markets undergoing change, uncertainty and ambiguity? Organizations of all sizes need to evolve and transform, often under massive pressure, as industry lines blur and merge and traditional business models are assaulted and turned upside down. In this new data-driven world, marketplaces reign supreme while interoperability, APIs and applications deliver unique customer value for new go-to-market models based on a cloud and IoT way of working. Analytics, IoT service mashups, fail fast business models and contextual data streams enable data to become the new currency for digital citizens and businesses and will determine business success or failure.

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A few years ago a popular industry buzzword term theme included server less and hardware less. It turns out, serverless BS (SLBS) and hardware less are still trendy, and while some might view the cloud or software-defined data center (SDDC) virtualization, or IoT folks as the culprits, it is more widespread with plenty of bandwagon riders. SLBS can span from IoT to mobile, VDI and workspace clients (zero or similar), workstations, server, storage, networks. To me what’s ironic is that many purveyors of of SLBS also like to talk about hardware.

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Bert Loomis was a visionary. This general session will highlight how Bert Loomis and people like him inspire us to build great things with small inventions. In their general session at 19th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Architect at IBM Bluemix, and Michael O’Neill, Strategic Business Development at Nvidia, discussed the accelerating pace of AI development and how IBM Cloud and NVIDIA are partnering to bring AI capabilities to «every day,» on-demand. They also reviewed two «free infrastructure» programs available to startups and innovators.

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Many private cloud projects were built to deliver self-service access to development and test resources. While those clouds delivered faster access to resources, they lacked visibility, control and security needed for production deployments. In their session at 18th Cloud Expo, Steve Anderson, Product Manager at BMC Software, and Rick Lefort, Principal Technical Marketing Consultant at BMC Software, discussed how a cloud designed for production operations not only helps accelerate developer innovation, it also delivers the control that IT Operations needs to run a production cloud without getting in the way.

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Microservices (μServices) are a fascinating evolution of the Distributed Object Computing (DOC) paradigm. Initial design of DOC attempted to solve the problem of simplifying developing complex distributed applications by applying object-oriented design principles to disparate components operating across networked infrastructure. In this model, DOC “hid” the complexity of making this work from the developer regardless of the deployment architecture through the use of complex frameworks, such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM).

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It is one thing to build single industrial IoT applications, but what will it take to build the Smart Cities and truly society changing applications of the future? The technology won’t be the problem, it will be the number of parties that need to work together and be aligned in their motivation to succeed. In his Day 2 Keynote at @ThingsExpo, Henrik Kenani Dahlgren, Portfolio Marketing Manager at Ericsson, discussed how to plan to cooperate, partner, and form lasting all-star teams to change the world and how it starts with business models and monetization strategies.

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Serverless Computing or Functions as a Service (FaaS) is gaining momentum. Amazon is fueling the innovation by expanding Lambda to edge devices and content distribution network. IBM, Microsoft, and Google have their own FaaS offerings in the public cloud. There are over half-a-dozen open source serverless projects that are getting the attention of developers. This year, expect to see new platforms emerging in

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At this point in the hybrid cloud evolution, data is accumulating quickly in the cloud and in data centers, not to mention moving from place to place. So it’s natural that storage concerns are rising. This recent survey from Wikibon found that software services are the most popular use of cloud technology, followed by infrastructure and platform services. All these applications’ data need storage that can scale up and down as needed, as another survey found: Cloud storage elasticity was respondents’ top cloud challenge.

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The explosion of new web/cloud/IoT-based applications and the data they generate are transforming our world right before our eyes. In this rush to adopt these new technologies, organizations are often ignoring fundamental questions concerning who owns the data and failing to ask for permission to conduct invasive surveillance of their customers. Organizations that are not transparent about how their systems gather data telemetry without offering shared data ownership risk product rejection, regulatory scrutiny and increasing consumer lack of trust in technology in general.

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As technologists, we find ourselves in the middle of tumultuous times and radical change: cloud, containers, automation, artificial intelligence, mobility, the Internet of Things, cyberwarfare, digital transformation, and more! When the $&#! hits the fan, military strategists reference a mental framework called the OODA loop, to sort chaos into clarity. At Perform 2017, we were reminded of how customers continue to find clarity amidst today’s complexity by focusing on their customers. This year’s Digital Experience track at Perform reminded us all of how to successfully orient performance management around the customer.

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